As anyone who has read my blog knows, Cine-Med creates medical education programs using video, the web, Flash and medical expertise. Project management is as much a part of my job as any multimedia technique.
Multimedia has come to mean video, audio, graphics combined into a user interface, in order to effect a user experience, be it for learning, marketing or a combination.
However let us not forget that text and images = multimedia. Thus, multimedia may in fact = books.
In 2004 we decided to start publishing books. Our first project, Advanced Trauma operative Management, actually began as a video.
In 1999 we began collaborating with a well known trauma surgeon in Hartford. his initial need was for a 15 minute educational video to present at a national medical meeting. So we shot some trauma surgery, edited and narrated, and shot a variety of trauma room, helicopter and hospital b-roll and interviews. We also shot 2 cameras during a mock car accident, from arrival of EMS, to using the Jaws of Life to "remove the car from the victim" and moving the immobilized victim to a helicopter in a nearby field.
The end result was a 15 minute video showing the injury(stock footage provided by National Highway Safety Institute), aspects of the extrication related to securing the airway and assessing injuries, then to the trauma bay (no one told the resident not to cut off the mock patient's clothes and do a rectal exam - can't stop the camera just for that!), and finally to the OR to show how to manage a spleen injury.
The video then became an interactive CD-ROM, to which we added some cadaver dissection, to show how to isolate blood vessels in the neck and other areas.
Over the next several years, elements of the CD-ROM program, combined with PowerPoints, live panel discussions at national medical meetings and monthly trauma courses at Hartford Hospital, the program was growing. The surgeon determined that he needed a textbook to accompany his course.
I had a lunch meeting with my boss. He told me "Mike, figure out how to publish a text book." This quickly became a team effort of people in the video department, our designer, copy editor, indexer, admin assistant and on the surgeon's side 3 editors, 2 admin assistants and a really big pot of coffee!
We first took a transcript of one of the live courses. The surgeon marked it up with his comments, then we had a copy editor clean it up further. We were given dozens of surgical photos and our illustrator set about creating about 80 original medical illustrations. This was all combined in a Quark document, then we began weekly review sessions with about 10 people around a table going line by line until we finally had a final draft.
Once the 5000 copies arrived from the printer, we added the book to our marketing efforts and set about our next book project. We also determined that we needed more storage space. To paraphrase Roy Scheider, "We're gonna need a bigger warehouse!"
The book, mainly as part of the course materials for the 1 day course, has been well received by trauma surgeons, surgical residents, and military surgeons. Surgeons serving in Iraq and Afghanistan have used the book as part of their preparations for deployment. That's cool!
A second piece of media needed for the ATOM project was a database. The previously described one-day course has now expanded to 15 locations in the US, Canada and Africa. Each student is evaluated based upon operating room performance, as well as a pre- and post-assessment. The data for each student are entered into...you guessed it, a database. For those in education, you know that justifying expenses and time requires sound analysis of data. The course admin website then allows the administrators to compare student performance across geographic areas, educational background and other comparisons as requested. An in-house php expert is an invaluable asset!
The end result of these efforts has been endorsement by the ACS, which will eventually administer the program, order more copies of the textbook and CD-ROM, and thus make these multimedia programs part of a renowned internationally recognized educational curriculum.
While I suspect most fellow COW readers may not be budding textbook publishers, my point in this discussion is that one should never discount a medium. As Ron recently wrote, while the COW website is using 2008 web publishing methods, the COW Magazine is using old school methods, yet has a considerable reach and is profitable for our community. This profit, presumably, allows us to have these blogs, podcasts, tutorials and all the bandwidth and server activity this popular website uses.
Likewise, the introduction of textbooks into Cine-Med's product line has added additional ways to bring in revenue. We now have 10 books in distribution and another half dozen in production.
http://www.cine-med.com/index.php?nav=books
Thanks for reading.
Mike Cohen
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